The Child Born on the Day the Temple Fell

She measured him in handbreadths. Every year she would take her young son and measure his height, then donate his weight in gold to the Temple. Her name is not recorded. Her son's name was Doeg ben Yosef, and when his father died young the boy became the center of everything she had left.

Then the Babylonian siege encircled Jerusalem and cut off the food supply, and the city starved. What happened next is recorded in Eikhah Rabbah 1:51, part of the fifth-century Midrash on the Book of Lamentations, in a single stark sentence. When there was nothing left to eat, she slaughtered her son with her own hands and ate him. The rabbis placed this story as commentary on the verse Jeremiah was said to have cried out before God: "Shall women eat their fruit, the infants of their nurturing?" (Lamentations 2:20).

The Divine Spirit answered Jeremiah's question with another: "Shall the priest and the prophet be slain in the Temple of the Lord?" The two questions bracket the event. The killing of the innocent and the killing of the holy, happening at the same time, in the same city, during the same siege.

The rabbis of Midrash Rabbah did not leave the text in the silence after catastrophe. They moved from Jeremiah's cry to a different question embedded in the same verse of Lamentations: "For these I weep." What are "these"? Each rabbi read the word differently. Rabbi Yehuda said the weeping was for the departure of wisdom and the departure of the Divine Presence. Rabbi Nehemya said it was for the end of the priesthood and the kingdom. Rabbi Yehoshua ben Levi said it was for neglect of Torah study. Rabbi Shmuel bar Nahmani said it was for idol worship. Zavdi ben Levi said it was for the abrogation of the Temple offerings. The Rabbis said it was for the dismantling of the priestly watches, those twenty-four groups of Israelites who fasted through the week on behalf of travelers, sailors, pregnant women, and nursing mothers.

Monday for those at sea. Tuesday for those on the roads. Wednesday for children, so that diphtheria would not stop their mouths. Thursday for the pregnant, that they would not miscarry, and for the nursing, that their children would not die. All of this organized communal protection ended when the Temple fell.

Then the Midrash does something unexpected. It turns from grief to expectation. Because in the same verse of Lamentations the word for comforter is menahem, and from that word the rabbis moved to a question: what is the name of the Messianic king?

Rabbi Abba bar Kahana said the Lord is his name, because Jeremiah wrote "this is what they will call him: the Lord is our righteousness" (Jeremiah 23:6). Rabbi Yehoshua ben Levi said his name is Tzemaḥ, meaning Branch, from the prophet Zechariah (Zechariah 6:12). Rabbi Yudan said his name is Menaḥem, because that word appears in the very verse where Lamentations says the comforter has withdrawn. Rabbi Hanina said both names carry the same numerical value: 138. They point to the same person.

And then the Midrash tells a story to prove it. A man was plowing his field when one of his oxen lowed in an unusual way. A passing stranger heard the sound and told the farmer: unharness your ox and untie your plow. The Temple has been destroyed. While the man was absorbing this, the ox lowed again. Harness your ox, the stranger said. The redeemer of Israel was just born. His name is Menahem. His father is Hezekiah. He lives in Birat Arva, in Bethlehem of Judah.

The farmer sold his oxen, sold his plow, and became a traveling seller of felt garments for children. He wandered from city to city until he reached Bethlehem. He found the mother. She told him the child had been carried away by storms and winds since birth, that he had never been safe, that his arrival on the day the Temple fell was itself an omen. The traveling man told her: what was destroyed on the day he arrived will be rebuilt on the day he returns.

The woman who weighed her son in gold and lost him to the siege. The rabbis arguing over what word to use for an unspeakable grief. The farmer standing in a field, listening to an ox, learning that something new had already been born on the day of the worst destruction. These three stories sit side by side in the same passage of Eikhah Rabbah because the rabbis refused to let Lamentations be only about what ended. The book of destruction, they insisted, contains the name of the comforter. You just have to read closely enough to find it.